Looking at things differently

Christmas is a family time and for us this year meant a visit back to the UK for Christmas with my daughter and her soon to be husband, combined on the Saturday before Christmas with the wedding of my nephew Christopher and his new wife Amy.

Chris and Amy had the great idea of photo challenge for the children, who they gave a disposable camera and a list of shots they had to collect, later in the evening I gave my Sony Nex 7 to my two young nephews of about 10 and 8 to go and take some shots.

They quickly filled the memory card(s) and used up the batteries but the results show a different way of thinking and looking at things. Of course there are some shots of the family and the guests at the wedding both in and out of focus but then there is a fascinating time lapse of one of the boys with a mask of a face on the back of his head and his waistcoat and tie on backwards walking up the stairs but looking as if he is coming down (or maybe the other way around - I don't know which way round they did it).

At midnight on Christmas Eve we went to the Christmas service at York Minster, a strange mixture of very busy with people but very calm in the way it all worked

I do not often watch the TV during the day but being the holidays I found myself channel hopping on the TV and found a continuous looping of shows by Dynamo a UK based street magician who did some quite amazing and for me anyway bewildering tricks.

I made a strange mental connection while watching Dynamo and slowly realising this must be who my little nephew had been talking about a year ago when he visited me and attempted walking on water "like Dynamo" on the lake near where we stay

I had imagined he meant some new cartoon super hero but did not ask - of course not wanting to reveal my growing old age  ignorance of such things / people but now I realise that he meant this magician.

You can see some of his magic at www.dynamomagician.com

I think he can be best summed up by a quote I found on the Internet

After much consideration...…I have come to the conclusion that Dynamo is actually a wizard who is slowly revealing his powers to the world.

In among my Santa presents was a cardboard 'make it your self' film pin hole camera which has taken me hours to build but is now ready for its first shot

 I also now have an infrared filter, I have seen some beautiful infra red photographs but my first shot using this filter is not too impressive. The top red image is direct form the camera, the black and white image has been cleaned up but only on my ipad

Hope to be able to include some better images in future blogs.

Today we took a chance with the weather which is alternating between light rain and very heavy rain with brief periods of very cold hailstones a bit wet for photographs apart from a few opportunities between the showers

We walked from Grasmere up to Alcock Tarn, but following our normal route backwards - the shot below is from just below Alcock tarn looking over Windermere

Shot below is looking across Alcock Tarn, with a young family silhouetting across the light, cheerful and lively despite the rainy weather (still needs a bit of levelling adjustment)

Posted with Blogsy

How nature changes in a week

Autumn is a great time for taking photographs, the trees show magnificent colors, the dawn is not too early, in the right places there can often be early morning mist which transforms the landscape into a magical unrecognizable place.

It can sometimes be cold, wet and uninviting to get up and go out early in the morning with my camera, but always it proves worth the effort as the sun starts to rise and light breaks through revealing what the day will really be like, the low sun, still water and changing leaf colours provide some great reflections and picture opportunities   

Unfortunately it is also one of our busiest times at work as we prepare plans and budgets for the coming year, this involves a lot of travel, dinners and late nights.

However I have manged to squeeze into my schedule 2 consecutive weekends in Grasmere, my wife stayed the full week, I took a little trip to Dubai in the meantime.

What really came home was how much the landscape changed in that single week.  The trees changed from being full of beautiful colored leaves to being at least half bare with the leaves lying on the ground, the weather had been dry (and windy) so the carpet of leaves was now dry and heading more towards brown than red, another week and I think the beauty of autumn will be over.

  

Back to the begining

 

Being on holiday I decided to try blogsy to write this weeks update. Unfortunately blogsy ate the first version, probably a mistake by me but I really don't know how it happened

Mixed holiday experience. Started with being sick all night on the ferry to England (food poisoning rather than sea sick) so much that I could not drive the car when we got to England. Lucky that after 2 years of refusing to drive my car Jane suddenly had the nerve to get us where we needed to be. Weather has also been mixed, mostly light rain mixed with heavy rain. Also took me a few days to recover so as a result both walking and photographing has been more limited than we hoped.

We did see a lot of our family which was really nice, and my nephew taught me to watch out for the wingless daddy longlegs which is of course the most poisonous thing on earth. ( lucky that he has weak fangs that cannot bite a tough person like me - the daddy long legs that is - not the nephew).

Both my sister and her two boys walked with us up to Easdale Tarn - a nice afternoon with no rain for a change but still enough water around to get the boys really soaked.

So bit of rain photography was needed........

 

 

 

Although the bridge made a nice photograph, by looking the other way you could see just how full the river was, overflowing onto an area which is normally a dry path.

Walking past the same spot the next day we found the water almost gone from the path and a group of artists sitting in the same spot sketching the bridge.

After the rain a lot of damage could be found all over the hills, with big landslides in some places, including a mini landslide across the main road into Keswick.

I have also started a course in photography from the Photography Institute in England. Online distance learning. Not sure if I need this or if it will improve my photographs but no harm in trying. Have done the first module, which dealt with lenses and cameras, and although I mostly already knew the material it was interesting to do the assignment which dealt with choosing what equipment you would take on different photo assignments

For the second assignment I have to photograph a household object - which is proving more difficult than it sounds to find something slightly interesting.

Back to work tomorrow.........

 

 

Posted with Blogsy